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In This Issue:

TikTok surpasses Instagram in user time, but not ad revenue

US ad market grows 6.2% in July, driven by digital media

Google’s August 2023 core update affects website rankings

X loses users and rankings after rebranding from Twitter

WordPress offers 100-year domain registration plan

Meet the new “cigarette influencers” in New York

TikTok Tops Instagram in Time Spent

Another study this week showing TikTok is taking a big bite out of viewing time — but how much of a bite are they taking out of ad budgets?

A new report released this week by Insider Intelligence found that American TikTok users 18 and older are forecast to spend 4.4 billion minutes a day on the app this year. Compare that with their forecast for Instagram at 3.9 billion.

One thing Insider notes was that this was especially impressive when you consider that TikTok has far fewer users than Instagram overall.

Instagram should close out the year around 118 million monthly actives

Insider believes TikTok is expected to hit around 82 million, though they did note the company claims it has many more

📈 Meta Still Dominates

So how well does that larger viewers translate to ad spend? Not as well as TikTok would probably like.

Quoting Insider’s report:

“Instagram's greater scale and ties to Facebook and other Meta-owned apps have helped it stay well ahead of TikTok in advertising spend. In 2023, the company is projected to earn around six times as much as TikTok in ad dollars per adult user for each hour spent on the apps…”

In fact, they say ad spending on Instagram will be about six times greater than it was on TikTok for this year. Facebook will be about five times greater.

🍽️ Reels “Cannibalizing” Instagram Time

One of the study’s authors noted:

“Reels are really cannibalizing time on other services on Instagram or feed. We're not necessarily seeing overall time on Instagram increasing because of Reels — people are just spending a similar slightly growing amount of time every year, and Reels is just part of that.”

“Reels is definitely getting more traction both with advertisers and with users now, but it still seems like it's very far behind TikTok.”

[Read more at Business Insider]

US Ad Market Grows 6.2% in July

More good weather appears to be in the forecast for the ad market.

After dropping just a bit in June, the U.S. Ad Market Tracker had its biggest gain in monthly ad spending for the last year and a half.

In fact, since last July, only one other month had actual growth, not a decline:

That was this past May with a 2.5% growth.

Last month’s growth was at a very healthy 6.2%.

That said, compared to July of 2021, that’s still down a little over 8%.

Quoting MediaPost’s coverage of this:

“Given better comparisons with year-ago levels that were experiencing a mini ad industry recession, the remainder of 2023 should see gains or at least less severe declines — even as many agencies and some media companies have been reporting a weak start to this year, citing macroeconomic volatility.”

[Read more at MediaPost]

Google’s Core Update Affects Website Rankings

As we covered last week, Google released a Core Update — these are big algorithm updates that change how their search engine ranks content — and usually happen every month or so.

Since then, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has been tracking the changes and volatility. He reported today:

“So far, and keep in mind, it is far from over yet, the update does not seem as widespread as previous core updates. That is not to say sites were not hit hard and in a significant way, but it just doesn't seem like this update had a footprint on tons of sites SEOs are working on.”

🕒 Was the Rollout Delayed?

Barry said the update appeared to start affecting things later than usual.

Google announced it last Tuesday, but it wasn’t until Friday that people started noticing any real changes.

While it doesn’t appear to have affected things as widely as previous updates, some sites were seeing traffic gains or losses of up to 80% — though, again, those huge movements were not common.

Google used to tell us what was in an update — for instance, deranking content that looked spammy, or adding a boost to pages with product reviews — but for the last year or so, they’ve stopped doing that.

Now their update page reads more like App Store updates on your phone: A very generic and not particularly helpful version of “Performance updates and bug fixes.”

[Read more at Search Engine Roundtable]

X Loses Users After Rebranding

We reported last week that X — formerly Twitter — saw its downloads on the app stores dramatically drop once its name had changed.

Now, we’re learning that name change was probably responsible for even more of a drop than just app downloads: Sensor Tower reports that in the two weeks after the rebrand, weekly active users fell 4%.

But revenue actually increased after the rebrand.

From August 6 through August 20, revenue jumped by around 25%.

That is a small measurement window, mind you, and might be more an anomaly than anything.

There was also another interesting uptick in downloads of its little-known cousin, Twitter Lite.

This is a mobile app designed for regions with slow Internet.

It did not change its name, so when people were searching for Twitter in the app store, this is all that came up with that name, so folks started downloading it.

In the week following the rebranding, Twitter Lite downloads more than quadrupled.

Also up — X’s competitors:

In that same first week, Bluesky downloads were up 180%

Mastodon apps were up 15%

[Read more at TechCrunch]

WordPress.com Offers 100-Year Domain Plan

Digital brand managers have a lot of nightmares:

What happens if our intern accidentally posts from her personal account to our brand account?

What if our Meta account gets locked by those policy enforcement bots and we can’t get in?

And — my personal hell-thought — what if I let my brand’s domain name expire?

It happens to big players, more than you might think.

11 years ago, Microsoft let its Hotmail.co.uk domain expire. Some squatters briefly took it over.

Kraft Foods forgot to renew Vegemite.com and someone bought it and posted a message claiming to be Kraft, and that they were discontinuing the product.

The Washington Post let its shortlink — wapo.st — expire, which broke every news story link shared on social media.

Now, there is a solution — the CMS company WordPress has launched a new 100-year domain plan. And it’s expensive. More expensive than just 100 years times $10 a year for a cheap domain name.

Because to buy this plan, you have to agree to a renewal cost of $380 per year — paid all up front, in an eye-watering $38,000 bill.

Which, to be fair, might be a no-brainer for a big brand that just wants to guarantee its domain won’t expire. Or, at least, will outlive every current employee.

WordPress also says it’ll throw in backups, unmetered bandwidth, and support.

👪 This is for… Families?!

Oddly, the company is trying to position it as a family product — the CEO saying in the announcement:

“Whether it’s giving a newborn the special gift of a domain and lifetime home on the web, or something you put in your will to make sure your website and story are accessible to future generations, I hope this plan gets people and other companies thinking about building for the long term.”

$38,000.

And let’s not forget that the Internet Archive does this for free.

But anyway, if you’ve got the change.

[Read more at Silicon Republic]

The “Cigfluencers” Are Here.

There are social media influencers for everything these days — toddler influencers, dog influencers, but here’s a new one: Cigarette influencers. And no, I don’t actually mean nicotine vapes — I mean literal light-them-with-a-lighter cigarettes.

The brand is called Hestias — it’s been around since the early 2010s. But they are boldly pushing into spaces that for a generation have been seen as off-limits.

They’ve been popping up at:

high society parties

at a literary salon

even recently raffled off as a prize at a Purity Ball fund-raiser held at the World Trade Center in New York

You can’t actually legally buy them in New York — only four U.S. states including Florida and Texas sell them in stores.

But the company does have an online store and the New York Times reports they’ve been seeding them with influencers in New York and Los Angeles.

😎 Cool, But Deadly

Quoting the Times:

“Cigarette makers have always relied on creating an aura of coolness around smoking to sell their products. But the old standbys like Marlboro no longer need to buy out full-page magazine spreads or put up billboards just to boost their brand recognition. Nor could they: Today’s tobacco laws restrict outdoor advertising in most of the country, and a majority of social media companies similarly prohibit tobacco-related advertisements.”

One influencer, a blogger called Meg Superstar Princess, wrote recently in her newsletter:

“Smoking cigarettes is extremely important and cool.”

Tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in most of the world. It is responsible for nearly one out of every five deaths.

[Read more at The New York Times]

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